my paper cuts with rustfmt - and what to do about them

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:26:22 +0200

rustfmt occasionally fails me. Of cause, the examples are somewhat taken from production code, but with all identifiers rendered unrecognizable and all strings replaced by random words. Unhelpful comments to all of this would be “why don’t you use shorter identifiers?” or “use shorter error messages”. But let’s face it:

Naming is hard. And if your foo function and your bar function both return a “result”, but neither can use the std::result::Result (slightly different semantics, non-binary logic, …) and you can’t introduce a common result type (too different needs for a one-size-fits-all, not even with type parameters), then you have to end up with a type name that says “result” with some more context. And a reader 10 levels up the call tree must not confuse the FooResult with the BarResult. Taking a thesaurus to come up with different names would be counter productive. Between a MyResult and MyOutcome, a human reader won’t remember which one is from foo and which one is from bar, what the API differences are, etc. The best name migh just be foo_module::Result and bar_module::Result and use foo_module::Result won’t help the reader.

Rust on Yet another blog restart

my paper cuts with rustfmt - and what to do about them